How to be human: advice for the future

Welcome to the second of The Verge’s two new advice columns (the first, Ask Stoya, premiered last weekend). Leah Reich was one of the first internet advice columnists. Her column “Ask Leah” ran on IGN, where she gave advice to gamers for two and a half years. After IGN, she completed her PhD in sociology, but so many people mixed it up with psychology that she figured she might as well get back into giving advice. You can write to her at [email protected].

The first time someone asked me for dating advice, I was 15 and had never had a boyfriend. My brother, 20 and away at college, called me at home in rural Colorado from the co-op where he lived in Los Angeles.